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View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoFRED SQUILLANTEChrista Schuman, creative director of design, selects clothes to try out on the mannequins in the lab store in the Limited Stores headquarters.

A place of its own -

If part of growing up involves moving out of your parents' house, then The Limited officially
has come of age.

The women's retailer from which Limited Brands grew has moved into a new home - the Water's Edge
development at 7775 Walton Parkway in New Albany.

The Limited's offices had been in the big Limited Brands campus on Morse Road since 1977,
remaining there even after Sun Capital Partners of Boca Raton, Fla., purchased 75 percent of
Limited Stores in 2007.

Plans for a change were announced in September, with CEO Linda Heasley calling it not only a
good deal financially but also "a final signal that we are our own entity. We've cut the final
strings."

The 53,000 square feet of space, spread over two floors, easily houses 150 employees and
includes room for the company to grow. Perhaps more important, the place has been designed to
reflect and encourage the company's resurgence as a brand.

"They want to show that they're a progressive, youth-minded company. That's a great step for
them," said Brian Shafley, president of Columbus marketing and branding company Chute Gerdeman.
He's also president of the Ohio Chapter of Retail Design Institute. "The Limited is going through a
kind of rebirth, and I'm sure they're wanting to attract all the right people. It's just a great
change, especially after the dismal retail environment over the last couple of years."

The sensibility for the new headquarters was struck more than a year ago, said Deb Camarota,
vice president of visual merchandising and store design construction. That was when real-estate
agents took her, Heasley and other Limited executives through the then-empty building.

When they arrived at an open corner with large windows, "someone said, 'Of course, this will be
the CEO's suite,'" Camarota said.

"And (Heasley) said, 'No. This will be used as a commons space.' So she really set the tone, and
that's how I approached this design."

Together with The Limited's director of procurement, Jeff Peterson, Camarota met with the
various departments to understand how each one works and interacts with others.

"People were so used to being in a cubicle, people were very siloed," Camarota said. "This was a
real opportunity to build a work environment where everyone could work differently from
before."

The two floors of the new Limited Stores headquarters are spacious, light-filled and loftlike.
Many areas have exposed ceilings, steel beams and concrete floors, with sliding glass doors on
offices and conference areas.

"We tried to keep the space as raw as we could, so we're using less materials, repurposing a lot
of things we already had," Camarota said. For example, conference rooms were furnished with tables
from closed stores.

"We didn't buy new for the sake of being new," she said.

The spaces once considered CEO-worthy now are employee lounges. On the third floor, red
banquettes are lined up along the windows, creating a bistro effect. On the fourth floor, a garage
door on one wall opens into a large conference room to allow for large gatherings.

Companies that go "out of their way to make what was the corner office into a great perk for
employees" are doing so to keep employees happy and focused, Shafley said.

"Retailers are getting a lot more progressive," he said. "Flattening out the organizational
pyramid is a trend we've seen. The idea is if you're the boss, you're working among the staff and
not cloistered away in some corner office, away from customers and employees."

Results from Camarota and Peterson's meetings with each department show up not only in the broad
strokes but in small touches. Every conference area, for example, is fully wired for
videoconferencing with the company's New York offices, Peterson said. "And we invested in higher
definition video cameras so they can see the product in detail."

A key area of the new headquarters looks quite different from typical office space for a reason:
It is a full-size mockup of a typical Limited store. The 3,000-square-foot "laboratory store"
seemingly has been transported in full from a mall.

But the lab store is hardly a gimmick, Shafley said.

"The more the corporate people can work with actual store fixtures and layouts, the better,"
Shafley said. "It makes the link between field and corporate so much stronger."

Outside the lab store is a large conference table and a wall covered in chalkboard paint, for
quick use during brainstorming sessions about product design and placement.

"We react to our business every day, changing promotions and seeing how our customers react,"
Camarota said, "and that agility is the thing that's helping us to win. To do that, we have to have
a clean space and to be able to put up product everywhere."

So far, everyone is "really, really quite pleased," Camarota said. "The space is private.
Private in terms of 'this is
our space.' We have our logos everywhere, we have our mission statements on the
wall."